


Football in the Park

by Happy9450



Category: The Newsroom
Genre: F/M, Pre-canon. Pre-series.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-11
Updated: 2014-09-11
Packaged: 2018-02-16 23:28:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2288567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Happy9450/pseuds/Happy9450
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This is an expansion of Mac's recollection of learning to play football from the last chapter of "Going Home."  This time, it's from Will's point of view.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Football in the Park

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Hairofgoldeyesofblue](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hairofgoldeyesofblue/gifts).



> This is an expansion of Mac's recollection of learning to play football from the last chapter of "Going Home." This time, it's from Will's point of view.

It had started after a rundown meeting when everyone was scurrying around and the anchor and his new EP were each ignoring substantial personal To-Do Lists. It began as a conversation about football, or as she called it "American football." He'd told her about the rules, the timing of a game ("Game, Mac, not match . . .") and when the discussion had gotten to the finer points of the quarterback's position, he'd offered to take her to the park on Saturday and teach her to throw and catch a pass. He'd just blurted it out, the offer . . . invitation, and now he couldn't take it back. He waited for her to demurrer politely. 

She'd had lunch or dinner with him six or seven times since her break up with Brenner (What an asshole!) but those had been either before or after a broadcast, and were quasi-continuations of the business day. Granted, they had talked far into the early morning several times, once walking for hours and twice returning to the studio when the restaurants where they were eating closed for the night. Afterwards, he'd lain awake trying to hold on to what it had felt like to be the focus of MacKenzie McHale's intense concentration. He'd relive their conversations . . . which sometimes were debates really . . . thinking of points he wanted to make the next time he saw her. 

She's just broken up with someone after years together, and she's really young, he kept reminding himself, almost fifteen years younger than he. Christ! She wasn't even thirty. Much too young for him (although, he had to admit, Brenner was also considerably older than she). But all of his attempts to reason with himself changed nothing. If he wasn't with MacKenzie, he was thinking about her, or dreaming about her. He'd developed a love-hate relationship with the near constant ache in his groin, but the thought of touching another woman was as repugnant as a taboo. About a month or so into feeling that his emotional age was seventeen, his body decided to join it. Two mornings before the offer of the afternoon in the park, he'd awakened from a wet dream. He couldn't believe it! He was forty fucking years old (forty-one, actually) and his mental image of MacKenzie taking him into her mouth was enough to bring him to orgasm. He'd been sort of aghast ("I asked your mother if there was anything on your fucking sheets . . .") until he had a fantasy of telling Mac about it and seeing her laugh heartily, right before her face softened into this smile that she had, and she kissed him.

"Oh! Well . . . Saturday?" 

He nodded, trying to look like the answer couldn't matter less.

"Yes." It sounded a trifle tentative, and he might have jumped in and snatched the invitation back, let her off the hook, if he'd not been so fixated on trying to process the fact that the word she'd spoken had actually been yes. 

"Yes," she said again with conviction. "I'd like that very much. I may be something of a challenge for your coaching skills, so be forewarned." She smiled at him (how did she get her eyes to do that little crinkle thing?) and asked what time he had in mind and should they meet in the park. He offered to get a cab and pick her up at her apartment, on Saturday at 2:00, and she gave him the address. 

(In years to come, Will would keep a mental list of the moments when joy and relief had coursed through his body like life's blood. There was hearing the words, "yes, I'm saying yes" in an alcove off of the news desk, and a surgeon telling him that they had successfully removed a bullet and re-inflated two lobes of his pregnant wife's lung, and the moments when MacKenzie's labors ended in exhausted grins as tiny, slippery, red-faced human beings slid into his outstretched hands, and the emergency room pediatrician telling him that while Enterovirus D68 was a virulent s.o.b., twenty-month-old Danny was responding to oxygen and the nebulizer and most likely would not have to be intubated after all. There were many, many more, of course, but he always thought of this one . . . Kenz accepting the invitation to the park . . . as the first of his life.)

She didn't ask him up when he buzzed, but then she would have known without his saying so that he was holding the cab. She bounded out of the door, carrying a "rucksack," wearing a Cambridge sweatshirt, jeans and "trainers," with her hair up in a messy ponytail. If Mac looked all of twenty-five in make-up, her expensive tailored studio outfits and spike-heeled designer shoes, that day she looked young enough to get him arrested. Dear God! I'm in love with a child, Will thought, as she ran toward him. A child who'd "read" Russian and been elected President of the Cambridge Union, but still . . . so young. Will clamped down hard on his unruly mind. Not in love, he corrected. He'd never allowed the L word to enter into his thoughts about any woman . . . any person, really.

As they rode uptown, she picked up the football from the seat. "This looks old," she observed in that direct way of hers. 

"I guess it is." (Ouch!)

The cab driver glanced in the rear view mirror. "Who'd you play for?" he asked Will.

"Nebraska. Cornhuskers."

"No shit!" The driver sounded so impressed, that Mac made a mental note to look up these Cornhuskers on the internet when she got home.

It was a glorious sunny, spring day in Central Park. They found themselves a relatively unpopulated grassy area where they could run without stepping on dogs or small children, and he began the lesson. She wasn't the most coordinated person on the planet, but she got the hang of it and seemed to understand some of the science of throwing a spiral for distance and accuracy. As they took a break, sipping the bottled water she'd had the foresight to bring, he began to fantasize about having her on his team during one of the games of flag football that he played with his sisters, their spouses and families on his infrequent visits to Nebraska. 

"Go out long," Will hollered, when they had finished their break, and she was moving away from him once again.

"Don't you mean far?" God, he loved her accent!

"Long means far."

"Not to the English speaking world." 

But she ran away from him and then turned around and readied herself to catch the ball. It was a decent catch, he thought. Of course, she would have been taken down where she stood by any defensive back worth his salt with her feet planted that way. Just as he thought this, MacKenzie tucked the football against her body, lowered her heard and began to charge him. And so he did what any red-blooded American boy would have done. He tackled her.

He rolled his body at the last moment to break her fall, and they tumbled together as the ball came loose. When they stopped rolling, she was lying on top of him, and their arms were around each other. 

"Well, alright, then," she said. He would realize about a year later that this was one of the stock phrases that she fell back on when flustered. 

He would never know why he said it . . . from where the courage to say it came, but he opened his mouth and told her about an old and obscure rule of American football. "The tackle-ee, that would be you, is required to kiss the tackle-or, which would be me . . . ."

She smirked, but made no effort to either extricate herself from his embrace or rise up from where she lay sprawled across him. 

"Is that so?" she asked. "And just how is this done?" But before he could answer, she resumed talking. "Perhaps," she said in a heavy Russian accent, "it is the Socialist Fraternal Kiss that you footballers use," and with that she slid up his body and kissed him soundly on each cheek. 

Will chuckled and gave up trying to tame his erection. There weren't enough sports statistics on the planet to keep it down with MacKenzie McHale's thigh pressed against him. 

"Or," she said, switching to a thick Parisian accent, "perhaps it is the ever-popular air kiss," and she touched a cheek to each of his and gave smacking kisses to the air at the sides of his face. "Then," she said, trying for an American accent, "there's the parental approval kiss," and sliding up him still further (oh, God!) she put both hands on the side of his face and tilting his head slightly, kissed him on the forehead and said, "good tackle, Billy." Then, switching back to her own way of speaking, she finished, "of course, there's always the Eskimo kiss," and moved down so that the tips of their noses were touching. This, of course, had the effect of lining up their mouths and lips . . . .

Unable to control himself, Will brought both hands up to frame her face, and turning his head slightly, touched his lips to hers. Nothing he had ever experienced, or even imagined or dreamt of prepared him for this moment. A charge of electrical energy shot through his body, connecting his mouth, diaphragm and groin. His heart raced and his breath stopped. He felt and heard her sharp intake of breath as her mouth opened slightly, and realizing that he could still breathe, he deepened the kiss. They rolled without taking their mouths from each other, until he was on top of her, her mouth open and gasping as his tongue played games with hers. What am I doing? I need to stop, he thought, until he realized somewhere in the deepest recesses of his brain that Mac was clinging to him, pulling him closer to her. She wants this! Yes, he thought, this much current can only be generated by a circuit. When the desire to push his pelvis down hard against her abdomen became almost uncontrollable, he rolled her so that she was once again on top. 

She broke free first, but still made no move to rise. She looked at him, her pupils dilated, and her eyes so wide with . . . what? . . . shock? . . . they looked black rather than hazel. She was still breathing hard when she spoke, "did you . . . plan to do . . . that?"

"No, not planned," he replied, gently brushing a strand of hair away from her face and tucking it behind her ear. She continued to stare at him and something in her gaze . . . the honesty of it perhaps . . . made him confess. "I dreamt about it, though . . . ." he said softly. Dear God! Had he actually said that? Made himself that vulnerable?

She didn't reply at first, but after a minute, she smiled, her eyes crinkling up the way he loved. Then, she rolled off of him and stood. Extending her hand down to where he lay still frozen on the grass, she said, "come on, Billy. I believe that there was a promise of ice cream if I did well with my football lesson."

"You know," he said, clearing his throat as he rose, "I really should tell you that no one, absolutely no one, ever calls me Billy." He tried to sound stern and forceful. 

MacKenzie McHale just looked at him for a moment and then melted him with her smile. "Well," she said slowly, "now someone does."


End file.
